I can’t quarrel with the overall outcome. This woman had amassed over $300,000 in student loan debt that she couldn’t possibly repay. She had started amassing the debt pursuant to her Rehabilitation Plan at 39, having never held a long-term job in her entire life. While education is often helpful, it’s unclear why Rehab Sevices would encourage a woman who’d never held a job in her life to go to law school, a profession that has a remarkably poor employment rate and high debt load, then drop out of law school and get a masters degree from some random place and then a PhD from an unaccredited online university, is just beyond me. All of these seemed practically calculated to saddle this woman with high student loan debt in return for utterly worthless degrees and no prospect for post-graduation employment. And, indeed, the debtor had not gotten a single job despite getting a Masters and a “PhD.” This is student loan abuse and ANYONE in a similar situation should have their student debt forgiven.

In addition, it appears that Ms. Todd lost many of the supports that had made her few past employment experiences possible. Despite having a significant disability that made it difficult to live independently, she received no housing support, no vocational supports beyond funneling her into overpriced educational programs, and no independent living supports. She was basically set up to fail.

That said, the opinion itself focused less on the inequitable actions of the lenders and rehab people, and more on how her “eerie disconnectedness from a comprehensive life experience” as a result of her “incurable ailment,” i.e. autism. Here are some choice quotes:

Notwithstanding the good intentions of all involved, Ms. Todd‟s and the DOE‟s collaborative mission to integrate her into the work force turned out to be a lost cause (outside of its purely academic benefits) due to her Autism and its utter negation of her ability to ever hold down a real job that paid significant wages.

The Court concludes that to expect Ms. Todd to ever break the grip of Autism and meaningfully channel her energies toward tasks that are not in some way either dictated, or circumscribed, by the demands of her disorder would be to dream the impossible dream.

And, rejecting to the defendants’ argument that Todd’s academic success meant that she could work:

[I]t is certain that however demanding her classroom experience was, Ms. Todd had the benefit of significant accommodations and the [Department of Education’s ADA and Rehabilitation Act] enforcement power behind her as she made her way through school.

So basically, receiving ADA accommodations mean that your degree doesn’t count as much of an achievement.

As bad as these quotes are, the quotes from the plaintiff’s expert are even worse:

A person with intellectual disability may be able to bus tables at McDonald’s but after 10 minutes the person may walk out the door and do something else unless the supervisor standing there telling them you can’t go outside to look at the birds, you need to bus the tables and this is how you do it.

So a person with Asperger’s syndrome cannot focus on a task and execute an eight hour day of something productive in order to be paid for doing it or producing something that is of less importance to an employer.

Yes, he did just say that Asperger’s is an “intellectual disability” that renders one liable to just wander off of the job site for no reason (keep in mind that this woman had no history of wandering off in the one job she’d had previously, and in fact had testified that she almost never leaves her house).

That this sort of catastrophic description of disability is extremely common among lawyers representing people with disabilities, especially those who are seeking some sort of benefit tied to the person’s ability to prove they can’t work. Lawyers aren’t really programmed to think much about how perpetuating stereotypes like this can hurt others with disabilities, such as those who may lose access to educational opportunities that actually will lead to work or those who are trying to combat employers’ perceptions that people with their disabilities aren’t valuable employees (and this case has already elicited delightful comments on the the ABA Journal’s article on the case, complaining that the ADA shouldn’t force lenders to lend to people with disabilities, and schools shouldn’t be admitting them).

That said, I’d like to think that a different litigation strategy could have gotten Todd the student loan relief she needed without forcing her to testify in court, and present expert testimony, that she was inherently unemployable and all of her academic achievements were meaningless. This sort of strategy can actually harm clients’ ability to deal with having a disability in the long term. Unfortunately, lawyers also aren’t really programmed to think about the effects that a litigation strategy will have on their clients’ lives beyond whether or not it will help the client win a particular case.